A huge company like Microsoft or Apple, or even Red Hat or Novell, can afford to put on big advertising campaigns, but most distributions, even ones like Ubuntu, cannot afford to do this. Instead, they must fall back to fan-based promotion or other small budget techniques. As Canonical begins to work with OEMs to get Ubuntu Netbook Remix pre-installed on UMPCs, there is something they can do that would provide great promotion at little to no cost, just by supplying some generic promotional material.

Quite often, the only indication of what operating system a UMPC uses is some small logo or something, potentially leaving buyers confused. To solve this problem, all Canonical needs to do is provide some generic text and screenshots that explain what Ubuntu is and why you might want to choose it over the Windows version, if there is one. For example, a sample paragraph provided might look something like this:

This netbook comes with Ubuntu Netbook Remix, an operating system designed specifically for netbooks. In addition to a customized interface, with Ubuntu Netbook Remix, you will not have to worry about spyware and viruses. Plus, common applications such as a web browser and an office suite come pre-installed for free.

Text like this could be printed, possibly alongside an Ubuntu logo or a screenshot, on the front or side of the box. This would be cheap to produce and could do wonders for increasing the number of people that choose Linux over Windows on netbooks/UMPCs/MIDs/can’t-we-just-use-one-name.

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